MY TOTAL MILEAGE in February was about 17,000
miles, in ten planes, two cars and two ferries, which took me on a lecture-tour
to Canada. It was highly organised by Mr. Graham Eglinton, the National Director
of the Canadian Prayer Book Society. During four days at King's College,
Halifax, I joined students from different faculties maintaining the Daily
Offices in the College Chapel as they awaited the appointment of a new Chaplain.
The Chapel was packed for the High Mass of Candlemas when I preached. I lectured
and preached to various groups in Nova Scotia, stayed on an organic farm near
Prince Edward Island, celebrating the Eucharist and preaching for the Continuing
Anglican Church. In Frederickton, New Brunswick, I met Archbishop Nutter, the
former Metropolitan at the two lectures I gave to clergy and laity. In Toronto
there was a weekend Patristics Conference where I gave two lectures alongside
Fr. Tony Bassett, Dr. Peter Toon and a Jesuit, Dr. George Schner. A three hour
journey took me to the lively evangelical parish of St. John's, Elora, where I
preached at Mattins to a large and mixed congregation. The choir and music were
cathedral standard. In Calgary there was an enthusiastic response from a large
and mixed audience of clergy and laity to Why Anglicans Should read the
Fathers, before flying to Vancouver for various commitments. The ferry took
us to Vancouver Island for two lectures and an unscheduled sermon at the Ash
Wednesday Eucharist in a small wooden church on the edge of the forest in
British Columbia where Dean Henderson is the priest.

The Wider Church Scene

Here I met with faithful clergy and laity
concerned to preserve the orthodoxy of Anglicanism at great cost to them and for
clergy especially, a risk to their job security and future prospects. It is
apparent that the Christian Church in general and the Anglican Communion in
particular have reached a moment of crisis. Fundamental to this crisis is the
emergence of two incompatible and competing religions within the Church, that
are not mere differences of "emphasis" but profound differences about
the content of Christian belief and the character of Christian life. They
express themselves in the authority of experience, the basis of liberalism, over
against the authority of Divine revelation that is the basis of orthodoxy.

For the liberal Christian, belief is essentially
a matter of personal opinion, formed on the basis of his own contemporary
experience; and experience in which scripture and liturgy, as well as his
engagement with various social causes, provide data for reflection. His religion
is not so much a matter of "Truth" (with a capital "T") as
of "truths", which are subject to continual change, revision and
adjustment, so as to be "relevant" to the world in which he lives. He
sees his church as the gathering of a similarly committed people who, in a
democratic world, must decide their "truths" by majority vote of
representative councils or synods, or whatever the political mechanisms might
be. (The Prayer Book and the Church in Crisis, Dr. Robert Crouse).

Crouse continues that for the orthodox Christian
"Truth" (with a capital "T") has been definitively revealed
in Holy Scripture, and authoritatively interpreted in the Christian Tradition.
The Christian's response is in terms of belief, understanding, and obedience.
"Relevance" then becomes a matter of seeking to apply established
doctrinal and moral standards to the situation in which he finds himself. He
sees his church as divinely commissioned in faith and order to maintain the
faith "once for all delivered to the saints", with the responsibility
of maintaining those standards, essentially unchanged from one age to another.
The dividing line does not shade into a bold black or white but carries grey
areas where some have tried to compromise their accommodation on one side or the
other.

A Matter of Authority

Even more fundamental is the question of
authority. This rests upon the revelation of God in Jesus Christ and has not
been delegated to the consensus that is too often and too quickly arrived at in
meetings, Synods or among Bishops. Too often the aim is to find the lowest
common denominator. In the absence of an Oecumenical Council or Magisterium, the
Book of Common Prayer has constituted our self-definition as Anglicans, and has
been not merely a "useful aid to worship" but the basis of our
theological method.

Since the start of Lambeth Conferences in 1867
the insistence has been upon the Prayer Book as the standard of doctrine and
practice. The General Synod of Canada in its founding document, The Solemn
Declaration 1893, pledged itself to "hold and maintain the Doctrine,
Sacraments and Discipline of Christ as the Lord hath commanded in his Holy Word,
and as the Church of England hath received and set forth the same in The Book of
Common Prayer … and in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion; and to transmit
the same unimpaired to our posterity."

As Dr. Robert Crouse (Formerly Professor of
Classics at Dalhousie University and Hon. Canon of Saskatchewan), has pointed
out, it would not have occurred to most Anglicans that serious questions of
doctrine and worship could be decided by local, provincial or even national
synods. The Prayer Book tradition was the standard. The campaign is to replace
it with The Book of Alternative Services which in many points and at some
points quite explicitly criticises and rejects that standard. The expressed
intention is that such liturgical changes should serve to introduce theological
changes – theological changes incompatible with the doctrine expressed in the
Book of Common Prayer, so that polarisation within the Church becomes sharper
and more widespread. Since its introduction in 1985 the cost has been in terms
of a demoralisation, a loss of spiritual vitality as laity have found themselves
unable to accommodate to the shape of the new religion emerging in their
parishes where the shepherd's attitude has been 'take it or leave it'. As Dean
Inge pointed out, the Church that is married to the spirit of the age is a widow
in the next. This fashionable religion that is being promoted in Canada is, as
Professor Hayes claims, out-of-date in a more profound sense because it is
"theologically inflexible and narrow, expressive of a school of thought
which has already passed its peak." Thirty years on, even Harvey Cox
realises that he got it wrong in The Secular City. The secularisation of
the Church is expressive of a generation now passing away.

Some of the Effects

Membership of the Anglican Church of Canada has
been dropping steadily. In 1961 there were 1,358,000 members but by 1994 this
had dropped to 781,000. This happened while generally the population of Canada
was increasing; Anglicans went from being 7% of the population to 3%. Of these
members only 171,000 were in church on an average Sunday in 1994. A safe
conclusion is that the active membership is about 250,000.

The majority in this membership is elderly while
the mass exodus of people since the 1960s has been mostly of younger people.
From 1961-1994 the membership declined by 50%, baptisms dropping by 60% and
confirmations by 80%. A predominantly elderly membership will decrease further
by natural causes. Like Nero, the National Church 'fiddles while Rome burns',
spending more time on Church structures than on evangelism, unable or unwilling
to evangelise. On the financial level the remaining membership have increased
their giving, enabling the Church to survive and even increase its spending
while legacies and endowments have been left by deceased members. Nevertheless,
a financial crisis seems to be looming as inflation and the cost of clergy
increases, the maintenance of older buildings becomes a liability and Church
bureaucracy becomes a growth industry. The 'knock-on effect' is that as parishes
feel financial strain in their budgets, the first item cut is the diocesan
"fair share" which is not seen as important a priority as the rector's
stipend or the cost of heating. At diocesan level cutting the "fair
share" to the National Church compensates for this shortage, for the same
reasons. Parishes may hold their own but diocesan income is falling and in 1996
the national apportionment budget was down almost $600,000 on the previous year.
Such financial decline cannot but affect the Church's wellbeing as it gives rise
to parochialism that could evolve into a congregationalism.

Another effect is the indecent disordering of
worship. The mood of most members has not been against "liturgical
renewal", even if there was some disagreement. The expectation was that
after controlled experimentation, the Church, would settle down with two
patterns of common prayer. While officially people were discouraged from
"home-made concoctions", unofficially, even a bishop encouraged his
clergy to see the ultimate goal of liturgical renewal as parishes having their
DIY liturgies. There has been liturgical anarchy on the part of those who wanted
a contemporary service whilst not wanting The Book of Alternative Services.
They have mixed their own 'contemporary service cocktail' that has started not
from liturgical or theological principles but from personal preference. This has
led to pressure to push beyond the BAS without revising the book.

Such a-liturgical cocktails have become mixed
with inclusive language, mother God and Father God, "extempore"
Eucharist in instant mode. Pastorally this causes chaos and disorder when people
move from one parish to another or when in sickness of mind or body they find
the Church's common prayer unfamiliar. It seems that the very idea of common
prayer has been savaged and with it much of the sense of unity and identity it
gave to the Church. Liturgy may well become the outward and visible sign of
inward and spiritual division.

With this disordering of common prayer has gone
the proliferation of new hymns in new books, on overhead screens, and on sheets
of copier. A collection of hymns was presented to the 1995 General Synod,
attempting to provide the Church with hymns that conform Canadian Anglicans to
modern sensibilities about inclusive language. Compared with the hymns of the
Wesleys or the translations of John Mason Neale they often lack poetry, doctrine
and ecclesiology. The step too far went beyond the commonly accepted practice of
using inclusive language relating to people. Language about God was altered to
'her/ him/ itself' and required a significant modification of many familiar
hymns. For example, in the hymn "Joyful, joyful we adore Thee" the
line, " 'Thou our Father, Christ our Brother', became 'Thou our Father and
our Mother'". Behind this trend is the avoidance of attributing masculinity
to God the Father and God the Son, which emasculates the doctrine of the
Trinity, while proclaiming God as the "Womb of life and source of
being" or addresses "her" as Sophia. For the liberal "the
language of faith is merely the symbolic representation of our own religious and
moral sensitivities", that requires the gender specific Trinitarian
language to be balanced by "gender neutral" forms such as
"Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier", or equivalent feminine forms. The
modifying or marginalizing of traditional religious language is part of the
liberal agenda. While the new liturgies did not go so far, new hymns might be
expected to prepare the way for this new language. Most people will sing
anything if the tune is right.

This raises the crucial question about the
authority of the Word of God that is the basis of our religious language and in
particular the theological significance of the images and language of Scripture.
As Dr. Crouse puts it:

"Is it, for instance, arbitrary (or perhaps
simply relative to a particular society) that Jesus tells his followers to
address God as "our Father"? Or that (with St. Paul), we speak of the
Church, the New Jerusalem, as our "mother"? Is it a matter of
indifference whether Christ is thought of as bridegroom and the Church as his
bride, or might those images just as well be reversed? Does the fact that Jesus
on one occasion takes to himself the simile of a mother hen protecting her
chicks mean that it is appropriate to address Jesus as mother" as well as
"son"? The questions can quickly become ridiculous; but the
fundamental question about the authority of biblical and traditional imagery is
of great theological and devotional importance… And the basic question, I
suppose, is this; Are the concepts images and language of the Holy Scriptures,
as understood in our tradition, definitive for our faith and practice as
Anglicans today? I think the answer must be "Yes", and I think that
the continued existence of Anglicanism depends upon that answer (Holy
Scripture and the New hymn Book)."

On the level of continuing Anglican Christian
education, the scene reflects the division that is characteristic of the whole
Canadian Church in that there is no overall syllabus of instruction or
Catechism, no uniform approach. This is not to say that priests are not
instructing people seeking baptism or confirmation, but continuing education in
the Anglican Way seems neglected, apart from a number of conscientious priests -
though such priests are left to their own devices. Gone are the days when
congregations were worshipping with the same liturgy, singing from a common hymn
book, listening to the same lectionary and having their children taught from the
same lessons. When this happened, even in the different expressions of the one
faith between Evangelical and Catholic parishes, the common ground of essentials
in doctrine and worship was the cement provided by The Book of Common Prayer
that kept that unity of spirit in the one body. It was easy to distinguish
between form and content between outward appearance and inward reality. Today,
that reality has been changed by the invasion of "the sweetgrass smell of a
native circle, the raised hands of boisterous charismatics praising Jesus on the
overhead and using the Book of Alternative Services, the relaxed informality of
an evangelical congregation with a DIY liturgy and even a gathering of "wimin"
whose experimental liturgy seems to be more focussed on Sophia than on
Jesus." The cover word for such variation is "diversity", which
means no more than division and disunity because the "common ground in the
essentials of the faith" is no longer present in the institution.

Finally

A final point! Some ordinands have had to leave
Canada and seek ordination in other parts of the Anglican Communion after being
refused ordination because of their orthodoxy. They were unable to sign the
necessary piece of paper that would have bound their consciences to the liberal
agenda. Space precludes discussion of other effects of the root cause of the
malaise in Canadian Anglicanism. The crunch will certainly come if Canadian
Anglicanism moves officially the acceptance of homosexual practice and the
blessing of same-sex unions that seems imminent in the Vancouver diocese. Then
"it will be torn apart along the fault lines where these two religions
digress"; that will plunge it into a pit of destruction.

Despite the bewilderment of many priests and
laity about what is happening to their Church there is a strong dynamic of
resistance. In Charlottetown, Halifax and Frederickton successful theological
conferences have been held over a number of years while St. Peter Publications,
in Charlottetown, publishes and distributes theological and devotional
literature in the Prayer Book tradition. These people see, that the only way
forward lies in the reaffirmation of the orthodox faith in the Anglican Way that
is rooted firmly in that wider patristic orthodoxy of the One, Holy, Catholic
and Apostolic Church of which it is part. To this end the Canadian Prayer Book
Society has been a mainstay of support at all levels of church life to these
clergy and laity.

When I visit the homes for the elderly in my
parish that I cannot help thinking this where my life is heading. When I look at
the Anglican Church in Canada I cannot help asking: is this where the Church of
England is heading? Let us hope that our bishops will have the strength of mind
to let their convictions hang out in the direction of orthodoxy and divert our
Church away from the edge of the abyss. May they have the courage to reverse the
liberal agenda that so obviously conflicts with apostolic faith and order.

Arthur Middleton
is Rector of Boldon, Hon Canon of Durham and a Tutor at St. Chad's College
Durham